


running on loop

by ScherbenByOpium



Category: Temple Run, Temple Run 2
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-25 00:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2602223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScherbenByOpium/pseuds/ScherbenByOpium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rings for all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	running on loop

**endless**

 

His ring is the heaviest of the lot, the Shard second only for its size, and he knows because he’s handled them all, once upon so many runs he can’t for the deaths of him tell if the Loop really did come before the Wings.

 

It doesn’t look like much, the thin twist of silver that looks almost too elegant for the finger – rough from flame and rope and injury, and whose fault might that be – he jams through it (it’s too tight and every so often he has to swap fingers), but he still hates it every time he does.

 

That doesn’t stop him from looking at it at every opportunity, and cursing it every time.

 

It’s probably why.

 

**and we all can watch the skies for angels**

When Guy had upended the pouch containing all the rings, laid them out and told each of them to pick one, back when Guy didn’t use to glare at the one he does now, as if bitterness alone could crack it to pieces, save him the way green crystals can’t, they’d littered all over the blanket, Barry, eyes running over them all, couldn’t at first find one that didn’t give him the urge to shudder (and imagine, then, having that in constant contact with his skin).

 

Then he’d seen the Wings. He’d been so sick of falling.

 

It isn’t that he doesn’t fall still; if he only knew how to use the ring, he’s sure convinced certain that he won’t have to any longer, and nor will he have to struggle to keep doing all the things (running, stealing an idol over and over that he doesn’t recognise to mean anything more than the last time he did) he doesn’t know _why_. He wants nothing to do with them, nothing to do with the monsters of monkeys that he’s had _far too close_ to him.

 

(He’s sick, sick of jolting into consciousness with the memory of teeth and breath, sick of forcing his own hands still, because he would claw at his own skin otherwise, and stillness turns his stomach to sickness, too.)

 

He’s tried. He’s laid the Wings carefully, reverently, onto his blanket all over again, morning afternoon and night; he’s knelt and he’s prayed (the best he can, but what finesse he lacks he surely makes up for in being honest-to-good-God genuine) and he’s pressed the gold-and-lacquer to his lips, and still the closest he can get to escape is in the precious moments of oblivion at the close of each run.

 

He’ll keep trying. He can’t expect reward without devotion.

 

**roots and ankles all**

Maria takes the Root, and tells them it’s because she likes how it looks. They know her better than to be incredulous, or to press for any more details when her attention is once again firmly on her smartphone.

 

**they say you won’t die in Heaven**

Santa’s eyes are rheumy from having been around too long; in the end, it is age rather than bitter winter winds and stinging coal dust from another life that undoes him. Once he might have thought that this meant his time was coming to an end, but the heavens have proved – he hesitates to call it more merciful (and immediately he berates himself for ungratefulness).

 

He can still make out the blue, a piece of cool, hard sky he takes between fingertips that tremble ever-so-slightly. _Sky Clasp,_ Guy – who knows the names of all the rings, who taught them all to survive just a little bit better, who doesn’t know any more than the rest of them do – tells him.

 

Santa, meant always for the skies, thinks it’s perfect.

 

**like for like**

 

A fact about the Claw: it doesn’t so much remind Scarlett to be quick of mind and foot both, but force it on her.

 

A few facts about Scarlett: her surname is Fox (common knowledge); she stashes little oddities only she seems to be able to find – they’ve all speculated why: is she luckier, is her sight keener? – in the hat Santa gave her, and the tear in it is from a stray blade, now lost somewhere she doesn’t care to pursue (less common knowledge); she took the Claw only partly out of kindness (not known to anyone else, she doesn’t think).

 

The kindness part of it is done unto Barry, mainly, because the secret of the Claw is its call to its brethren: Guy had told her this with a grimace that told of (and from) nasty experience. His shudders when they bring up the topic, and when he returns from certain runs with blood on his shirt and jeans and a scream locked behind his teeth, don’t go unnoticed by anyone with eyes (and Santa).

 

And as for the other: she’s alone in this, but the reason the others die and she instead seems to thrive with a neat collection of incredibly useful nothings on top is that yes, _she dares play._

 

It’s only fair that the other end of it be upheld.

 

**from the rarest of gems crafted**

 

Don’t think Karma doesn’t see Francisco’s fascination with the Shard, even if he does make an effort to hide it during the day: the feather-light brush of razor-edged ruby against his chin, cheek, lower lip, entirely accidental; fingers curled loosely around the band of thundercloud-dark stone (dark as the nights that fall thick with the muffled, nocturnal scurrying of monkey-feet and fitful sleep, dark as ill omens), only in contemplation.

 

It’s during such a night that Karma starts awake (for no reason in particular; she had dreamed, probably, of running, as she sometimes does, invariably to rise the next morning fatigued as if she’d not dreamt the night through) to find Francisco, on the bunk across, similarly sleepless.

 

He’s so silent that she would have thought he were asleep after all. Shifting in her sheets – he doesn’t so much as stir at the sound – she can just about make out his face, and the hands cupped before it. His mouth is slack, and his eyes above his hands unblinking, almost the same black as the night.

 

_Francisco,_ she says, after enough minutes pass that she grows cold, from the blankets that pool mostly useless at her hips and the arm, bare, that props her up from her pillow, from the creeping worry of something amiss.

 

He moves, then, jumps as if he’s been caught out on a secret. Which he has; she doesn’t miss the way his hands clench tight on reflex as if by doing that he were keeping it buried deep rather than betraying it. And even if that were the case, the cuts on his hands – jagged, vicious, deep enough to touch bone in places – would have told the story anyway, no matter how he might have wanted to hide them.

 

He grits his teeth and doesn’t look Karma in the eye when she bandages them the best she can, early in the morning when no-one else is awake but Francisco, fumbling, pained, trying without success to clear away sheets stained with red (that, she puts a swift stop to).

 

It’s a futile gesture. By the evening, by the time he’s back grimacing from his first run, his hands are in tatters again.

 

**open real wide (for fear that they’ll see)**

 

Zack has a helmet, and none of the rest hear how he berates himself beneath it.

 

Cowardice is his sin, by the (too) simple logic that if the Maw protected the idol, then wouldn’t it protect he who gripped the idol in the arm that wasn’t wrapped around his football, too?

 

He’s long since stopped hoping for it, but he keeps the ring around anyway. It’s a reminder he deserves (because the others, they never tried to save their own skins like this, did they?).

 

**tie me beautiful**

 

Karma often wonders, looking at Francisco, a conquistador and lover of all that is beautiful and expensive at heart, turn his over in his hands, enthralled (which is often, both the turning and the looking) if she’s the only one who doesn’t care either for or about her ring at all.

 

Then, almost immediately, she wonders if she should, since there must be a reason for the water in Santa’s eyes that has nothing to do with rheum, for the way Barry grips the Wings until he has them imprinted for a short while pale on his palms, for the way Scarlett, who she usually likes well enough and believes likes about the same amount in return, sometimes catches her eyes between glances to where the Claw fits ugly on her finger, and lifts that hand up with a look of challenge.

 

It’s because of this that Karma finds herself staring at the Rocks just as much as the rest of them do their own rings, in a silent struggle to see anything but pretty chunks of glistening pink and their surrounding wisps of blue.

 

**Idol’s Curse**

 

_The most ridiculous one of all._


End file.
